15,000percent increase against the DDoS attacks in the airplane sectors while against embassies
and consulates they have risen by 186 percent. Thus, it can be concluded that DDoS is one of the
most dangerous cyberthreats in today’s world.
The report also suggests that on average, it takes merely five minutes before an IoT device
is targeted and infected by a DDoS attack while they are connected to the internet. More-
over, it only requires 24 hours until dierent malware and exploits kits attack an IoT device.
Cybersecurity experts believe that this increase in attacks is due to a new approach of hackers
who are operating and managing their attacks as a legitimate business does. As the report stated
that, “[The] DanaBot campaign increased distribution eciency and cut labor costs by using an
aliate model that encourages specialization among threat actors and substantially increases
the pool of potential victims across the world.”
The report highlighted that around 35 nation-states advanced persistent threat groups had
governments, telecommunications, academia, and finance in their crosshairs.
Quick Challenge
List all the DDoS attacks that took place in the last 10 years and their impact on businesses.
Constrained Application Protocol
The constrained application protocol is a protocol which is used for the web transfer of
constrained networks and nodes in the IoT ecosystem. The protocol is created to facilitate M2M
(machine-to-machine) applications like building automation and smart energy.
Since this is a new protocol and there has not been much strenuous testing of it security-
wise, particularly factoring the modern cyberattacks, therefore this attack poses a risk against
DDoS attacks. Taking apart its security loopholes, CoAP is not too dissimilar to the HTTP
protocol in its working; other than the fact that it uses UDP over the conventional TCP protocol.
As a result, the data packets do not receive acknowledgments and hence it is convenient for
cybercriminals to attack devices using this protocol via a DDoS attack.
Similar to the HTTP, CoAP also helps in the transfer of data and oers support for all the
relevant commands such as Get, POST, connect, and others. Moreover, command transmission
and multicasting are also supported by CoAP, however, since it uses the UDP; therefore there
is no need for session table maintenance. This is why it is not many resources intensive and is
considered a niche protocol for resource-scarce and small devices such as IoT.
CoAP is known to be prone for similar vulnerabilities which are faced by UDP-based
protocols: packet amplification and IP address spoofing; they enable the likelihood of
DDoS attacks. The possibility that an IoT cyberthreat can attack devices with CoAP and the
amplification factor falling in the 10–50 times range, it is truly dangerous for IoT devices,
especially considering the size of packets.
When a hacker breaks into the CoAP, they can proceed with the replacement of the sender
IP because it is said that IP spoofing processes are easy to conduct against the CoAP protocol.
Since confirmation and authentication are not needed by the client, therefore a cybercriminal
can easily send malicious packets with fake IPs. As a result, it becomes quite easy to infect IoT
devices with DDoS.
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